How can food allergies be treated?

By changing the food. But here's the problem: a lot of people think they can change brands. They think it's a brand problem. It's not. This is an ingredient issue. So you've got to be intentional about what you change your pet's diet to. You can stay within the same brand of food. We just need to look for a different ingredient and a different primary ingredient you're feeding. When I say the primary ingredient, I'm talking about protein. The vast majority of the allergies we see in dogs and cats when it comes to food is the main protein of the diet. Cats primarily eat beef, fish, and dairy. For dogs, it's usually chicken and beef. If I have a cat eating a fish-based diet, I like to try something a little bit more exotic. I like to go with something like, believe it or not, a rabbit diet. That's pretty easy to find for the most part. Hopefully, COVID hasn't created too many issues in the supply chain for rabbit food, but I think that's always a good choice for most cats. But you have to change the food. The second thing is if you have other cats in the house and they're getting a different diet, you have to be very intentional about making sure the kitty that we suspect has a food allergy cannot access your other cats' food. Third, if you have a cat that goes outside, we're kind of rolling the dice because if your cat likes to roam the neighborhood and it might find another food source, that can be a little bit out of our control. If you've got some neighbors who are putting some food out to get in good graces with your kitty, have a conversation with them or give them some food. You can say, here, I'm going to give you the food. This is what they can eat, and let them put that food out. So there are ways of getting around that, but the key thing is that you have to be very intentional about what they consume.

Food allergies are diagnosed with a food elimination trial. So we have to prescribe a hypoallergenic diet, or we call it a novel protein diet which is a food that only has a protein that your cat has never eaten before and we are gonna feed that specific food for usually about 8 to 12 weeks for a food trial time. In that time, your cat gets no other foods at all. They only get the prescription diet and treats that we might prescribe, and we're looking to see if your cat's symptoms improve while they're on that food and that's how we diagnose food allergies.